Curator-led tour and artist talk: Jeanno Gaussi

In October, the artist Jeanno Gaussi will be our guest: following the guided tour, she will talk about her work ‘Flügeldecke’.

In 1943, a Quattrochord grand piano left August Förster’s workshop in Löbau; it had been built on commission from Albert Speer’s office and was intended for the Marble Hall of the New Reich Chancellery: four strings per key instead of the usual three, weighing seven hundred kilograms. The Mitte Museum houses a grand piano from the same manufacturer, model 155 – a different instrument, built for other purposes. Its origins nevertheless lead back to a workshop where master craftsmanship was interwoven with the war economy and political instrumentalisation.

Jeanno Gaussi gives this grand piano a new covering: a yorgan quilt, hand-quilted in the Turkish-Ottoman tradition. Two layers of fabric, joined by a natural filling and characteristic hand-quilting – care, craftsmanship and collective memory, set against the monumentality of the instrument. Exhibited in Wedding, the work combines German remembrance with Turkish craftsmanship and asks which voices culture gives space to.

Jeanno Gaussi was born in Kabul and grew up in Kabul, Delhi and Berlin. Through video, photography, objects and texts, she creates installations exploring place, memory and identity. Her works have been exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13) and the Havana Biennial, amongst others; in 2025, she received the Körber Foundation’s Exile Visual Arts Special Award.